Jonathan Butterworth

Jonathan Mark Butterworthis a Professor of Physics at University College London (UCL) working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). His popular science book Smashing Physics, which tells the story of the search for the Higgs boson, was published in 2014 and his newspaper column / blog Life and Physics is published by The Guardian.

Research and career

As of 2017 Butterworth works on particle physics, particularly the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. His research investigates what nature is like at the smallest distances and the highest energies - the fundamental physical laws. This tells us about the physics which was most important in the first few moments after the Big Bang. His research collaborators include Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw and he has supervised or co-supervised several successful PhD students to completion on the ATLAS experiment, ZEUS and HERA.

Butterworth frequently discusses physics in public, including talks at the Royal Institution and the Wellcome Trust and appearances on Newsnight, Horizon, Channel 4 News, Al Jazeera, and BBC Radio 4's Today Programme and The Infinite Monkey Cage. He appeared with Gavin Salam in the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) documentary Colliding Particles - Hunting the Higgs, which follows a team of physicists trying to find the Higgs Boson.

His research has been funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Royal Society.